Mobile ecash payment for merchants now made easy by Ezetap

CHENNAI / BENGALURU: Bengaluru-based Ezetap Mobile Solutions has tied up with mobile wallet companies such as Paytm, MobiKwik, Novopay and Freecharge to facilitate ewallet usage on its point-of-sale devices. The first-of-its-kind move is expected to help merchants accept payments from an ewallet using tap-and-pay or single-factor authentication method.

“A merchant cannot have all the wallets in his mobile. For him, this is a one-stop solution,” said Abhijit Bose, founder of Ezetap. Bose said the move will give a major fillip to mobile wallets in India. The company has the first mover’s advantage and is now in talks with various cab aggregators to enable the single solution platform, he said.

The company also plans to introduce standardised transaction rates for all mwallets. With the mobile wallet market size in India estimated to reach Rs 1,210 crore by 2019 from Rs 350 crore in 2014, as per a study by research firm RNCOS, other players have also come up with similar solutions. Last month, Mumbai-based ePaisa launched an mwallet acceptance on its merchant app.

“With this, the merchant can carry out the wallet transactions via the ePaisa app at a 20-30% lower cost,” said Siddharth Arora, founder of ePaisa, which has tied up with Paytm, Citrus Pay and MobiKwik. According to him, over 1,000 users including retail merchants and restaurants carry out transactions via the app.

According to the Reserve Bank of India’s latest report on payments, in August alone 4.3 crore transactions worth Rs 1,335 crore were made using mwallets. This has intensified competition in the industry.

“We are working closely with our parent company to roll out services that will enable wallet payment on traditional PoS devices,” said Bhavin Mody, director of Mumbai-based E-Billing Solutions, which is part of Ingenico Group now.

Several people ET spoke with about Ericsson’s India operations, including its current and former employees, said the Stockholm-based firm has reduced headcount in the last one year or so across functions, in line with its global restructuring.